Looking at the facts of James Dean Bradfield’s life in music, it’s hard not to conclude that the Manic Street Preachers’ front man must be an obliging sort of person. It was, after all, Bradfield who was charged with the job of taking Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards’s dense, polemical notes and alchemising them into something that might work as rock music.

When it worked it was a technique that spawned startling results, in particular the grisly memoirs of Edwards’s 1994 swansong The Holy Bible. After the guitarist’s disappearance though, the band’s raison d’être seemed less clear. With Wire increasingly unable to move his world-view out of the sixth-form common room, it seemed reasonable that, after all these years, Bradfield might have something different to say. The auguries were good. Ocean Spray — the band’s most affecting song since Edwards’s departure — was inspired by the death of the singer’s mother. But the emotional toll of its creation deterred him from penning another for five years.

You sense that if he could have avoided writing an entire solo album, Bradfield probably would have done. But keeping two homes — one in Cardiff and one in London — necessitates: (a) time spent on trains; and (b) the reflection that comes with that.

Whether he realises it or not, Bradfield has written an album about an emotion so Welsh that it doesn’t have an English word. Hiraeth — the unsatisfiable longing for home — casts an unmistake-able shadow over The Great Western. “And as we cross the bridge/ We should stay” he sings on Emigré. With its faint piano pulse and descending chords, it details a three-hour journey to the Wales depicted by the Anglesey painter Kyffin Williams, in search of a place that, ultimately, may not exist: “We’ve got directions but nowhere to go,” he concedes.

It helps, of course, that Bradfield has been liberated from the need to shoehorn someone else’s words into his tunes. The songs come with choruses that soar more convincingly than before. And yet, for its anthemic qualities, the fog of melancholia never lifts from The Great Western. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Transit has a way of shaking ghosts out of the ether, more so for an artist with more than his fair share of bereavements. Dedicated to the Manics’ late mentor Philip Hall, An English Gentleman oscillates between skipping-pace reminiscences and a vivid sunburst of harmonies.

Bradfield’s love of life is undeniable here, but it seems to come with an attendant resentment of mortality. On Saturday Morning We Will Rule the World is like Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road transplanted to the Valleys, deployed with a confidence that makes you wonder why he didn’t assert himself before.

Quite what this all means when the Manics reconvene is a point worth dwelling on. If Bradfield takes some time to examine the lyrics of The Great Western, an underlying message seems to recur: you can never go back. On the basis of these songs, it seems increasingly unlikely that he might want to.

(Columbia)

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